Of course, there had been plenty of academic studies before, examining imperial connections, such as Victor Kiernan’sThe Lords of Human Kind, many books on the East India Company and the pioneering work of Catherine Hall, chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at University College London. But these did not pierce the nation’s jugular in the same way.
Corinne Fowler worked on ‘Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted’ (funded by Heritage Lottery and the Arts Council), a child-led history and writing project which sought to make historic houses’ connections to the East India Company and transatlantic slavery widely known. Between 2019–2020 she was seconded to the National Trust to conduct research tests on all aspects of curation, interpretation and training to lay the groundwork for telling these stories. The actual documents that seem to have come under attack are https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/colonial-countryside-project and https://nt.global.ssl.fastly.net/documents/colionialism-and-historic-slavery-report.pdf.
